Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

A 2009 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indeed linked higher levels of empathy to an oxytocin receptor that varies genetically and functions as a neurotransmitter. Subjects with a particular genetic variant scored consistently higher on an empathy test measuring the ability to infer the mental state of others. Could Aco have simply been born with a “sympathetic brain” that made him unusually prone to making such inferences? It’s an alluring idea. It is also a dubious one, not least since, as with Stanley Milgram’s study of obedience, there are limits to how much a lab experiment—even one conducted with sophisticated brain-imaging technology—can tell us about how people will act in the real world, as some researchers acknowledge.